Words by Charles Steinberg

For twenty years, Tim Hecker has existed as a recording artist transmitting through the nebula, intentionally testing thresholds in his dense but spacious compositions of, as he describes them, “chromatic clouds”. More than any other modern architect of such ambient energy fields, there is a mysterious magnetism inherent to Hecker’s designs. They are wholly absorbing sensually, and yet you’re never quite sure of your footing or your bearings...or in some cases, your safety. So, it was auspicious that Tim Hecker’s first score presented him with the task of making a wholly uninviting world somehow hospitable. 

The hypnotizing ambiguity of Hecker’s musical style was apropos for the Andrew Haigh helmed mini-series, The North Water, which brings the audience along as stowaways on a nineteenth-century English whaling vessel of dubious intention and crew. The environment aboard and surrounding its course is, in a word, perilous. Wielding his powers, Hecker’s music manages to pull you into places you’d rather not be. Into the cold and wet, the dark and foul. By the time you’ve gotten through the conclusive fifth episode, the layers of Hecker’s score have become protective, even warming.

While Hecker’s soundtrack wouldn’t be characterized as charming, it serves as a guide through the bottomless waters and frozen plains of the north. Some of the cues mimic the prolonged, sea sickening bobs of a ship far out at sea. Hollow extensions of synth and cello rise and fall with the strength of the winds on which they are carried. The visceral connection of the viewer to events has to do not only with the tonality of an instrument but its manual application. The sustain of minor notes sustain the tensions of sequence. They expand into the void, disturbing signals that there are places you can go, physically and psychologically, from whence you cannot return. 

In his astonishing first score, Hecker probes the mercilessness of character and nature that have no regard for the wellness of souls in their path. Stylistically and practically, the leap from solo composing to scoring was not too wide in his inaugural effort. May there be more to come.

I had always hoped you’d get into scoring. Were you waiting for the right opportunity or did it only recently interest you?

It was a combination of waiting for the right opportunity and doing a few smaller things to get my feet wet. You can’t just jump into a studio film if it’s your first score because you’ll get killed by the process and workflow. There’s a technical sophistication that’s required to deliver things in a certain format and speak a language that the director, editors, and producers understand. You also have to wait for a director who believes in what you do. 

First and foremost, I’m a recording artist and I work on making records for my own interest and self-encapsulating worlds. Sometimes that can work for film but It wouldn’t make sense to just graft my solo work onto a picture because often the sound is total, and it could dominate. With a few exceptions, we’re not in a visual culture that wants music to be super strong. It’s generally the opposite, where music accents mood so that you barely notice it. 

You’ve said before that you have deliberately avoided text and contextualization in your composition. Was the choice to take on film music partly a challenge to yourself to create within parameters of literary and visual reference?

I think you have to differentiate between textuality and meaning in visual culture. In my own practice, I’ve avoided circumscribing meaning. I’ll do something vaguely political: A statue of the virgin mary that’s wrapped in burlap because there’s work being done on it (The image on the cover of Hecker’s 2013 album Virgins) also looks like Abu Ghraib. But I’m not going to say that album was a reference to Iraq. It’s left to the listener to find their own meaning and I like playing with that boundary between the legible and the illegible. Scoring is more on the nose because you have picture. It’s more constrained, but it’s how you accentuate the needs of a scene and express mood and affect within that constraint. I enjoyed that limitation.

What drew you to this story? What did you think your music could provide to a story this merciless?

For me, doing a five-hour story about a nineteenth-century whaling expedition was a ridiculous proposition on its surface, which made me interested in it. Also, the suffocating and claustrophobic nature of being on a boat at sea and the underlying questions of masculinity that are explored with men stuck together were intriguing. The survivalism entailed and the bleakness of the wasteland was great tableau for music. When I was speaking with Andrew (Haigh) beforehand, he was clear about wanting the music to play a prominent role in that landscape. That was generally how it worked out.

The character of your solo work is sustained in the music for The North Water. That’s not always the case for a solo composer within a visual medium story.

It’s the ideal situation when your character can come through the music you contribute to a creative project. You feel artistically fulfilled. If I were asked to do some jazz standards or a ragtime type of thing, or mimic Clint Mansell, that wouldn’t be as fun or fulfilling. I wanted to do something that served the picture but in a voice, I was comfortable with. Still, there were things that were different from my own work in terms of percussion and a monochromatic aspect in some of the set pieces. There was more of a performative style of keyboard and musicianship than what I would do on a solo record.

What inspired you to write the music that would accompany a whaling expedition?

I found these ten-hour youtube videos of things like “ships at night” or “storm ship” and I would loop them in the studio to get into this weird headspace. I also wanted to mimic the sounds of a whale, so I found a few live arctic whale-call webcasts. But I had a poetic, abstracted sense of what that sound would be, so I sort of stumbled my way there.

I started with an examination of glissandi (note and pitch bending). I used techniques to pitch track a cello and its fundamental tone with a sign wave, so it would bend and almost become a sonar transfiguration. A lot of orchestral samples want you to stay within the twelve-tone system and there’s so much more to it when you bend between notes. If I’m not writing for an instrumentalist in a studio, I’ll contort samples so they’ll be more flexible and expressive than they are given to you out of the box.

Some scenes are among the hardest to watch I can remember in a network series. You had to score a man dying in agony from a skull fracture, as well as an improbable surgery. How difficult was it for you to approach this material? 

I like to loop a scene and absorb its energy and then write some music but some scenes were insane to have looped. I got into a kind of twisted mental space by nature of going there [with this material]. You can’t hide in the corners of those pictures. I needed a beer after cueing some of those scenes. 

I was writing this music in a period of uncertainty. Scoring pictures can become a way to help you work through something you’re not wanting to deal with because you have to stay present. When you ask the question: “How do I sonify this?'', it involves being present and living with difficult emotions, and responding appropriately through sound. I find that you can’t really fake that...Being on a ship like the one in this show represents fear of solitude, or abandonment, or being alone in the world. In a period when the world was quiet and I wasn’t seeing anyone, it was easy to connect to the characters of this story. This is a heavy, gritty story, and the music needed to reflect that intensity – and that sometimes there’s not a reward at the end of things. 

I’ve often felt a heightened sensitivity to space when listening to your compositions. Whether it was a dark tavern in Hull or the close quarters of the ship or a vast icy expanse, your music translated the feeling of how big or how small a space was. 

That all came down to a question of the relationship of reverb to the level of intimacy needed in the sound where the scene takes place. Maybe half of the scenes are in a claustrophobic wooden ship where you can barely stand up. So it wouldn’t make sense to have a twenty-second reverb tail on drums there. You need something suffocated and muted for that environment. There were other scenes where I recorded the music in a massive cathedral in Montreal that I think Howard Shore used for a Cronenberg film he scored. The reverb on that stuff is twenty seconds and that treatment reflects being out in the elements and survivalism. It made sense for the open arctic space – I love the natural reverb of any kind of massive space. I don’t ever get bored of it. I went between those two reverb levels: the almost anechoic, tight room reverberations and the deeper, more cavernous ones. 

Can I ask you a question? How do you feel the soundtrack reflected what you watched? I'm curious because I haven’t watched the whole five hours in its entirety since the picture was locked.

What I appreciated was the cohesiveness between spectrums. You can take one dramatic scene of a whale hunt and compare it to a scene where the villain, Drax, is quietly revealing how dangerous he is simply by encroaching on someone’s space, and they feel cut from the same dreadful cloth. The music reinforced the argument that a character like Drax is just as threatening as the elements of the Arctic sea.

He’s a pretty great character, right? I think that’s one of Colin Farrell’s better roles. He’s menacing but in a Jeckyl and Hyde way. He has so many aspects. He’s incredibly charming and you realize that he’s smarter than he seems. Like when he espouses this Hobbesian idea of life as being brutish, nasty, and short. He reflects that the depths of the Id in humanity can be just as abysmal as being shipwrecked in the dead of winter.

You allow for expansive fields of space for your writing to evolve in your solo records. Did you discover different approaches with instrumentation because of the structures of composing for a miniseries? 

 I had some colleagues give me great tips about how to work with instrumentation for the film format. Before he passed away, Jóhann Jóhaansson was telling me how on Sicario, he worked with an ensemble in these exploratory sessions before writing the music. Then he digitally manipulated it, adding the scoring stage stuff at the end. That’s kind of what I did for North Water. I was working with solo instruments and stitching them together with sample beds. It wound up not being that different from my solo sessions in the way of bringing in an electronic piece, letting it interact with other elements like voice or instrument, and hammering a piece until it takes a sculptural form. 

For years, I was obsessed with abstracting the legible into the illegible in terms of taking everyday instruments and turning them into alien landscapes and chromatic clouds. It didn’t matter if it was a piano or a plucked guitar string that triggered that. Then at a certain point, I wasn’t afraid to bring legibility in instrumentation and reference back in. I’m more comfortable working with instruments in that way now, especially after this project.